When the American military forces left Nicaragua for the last time, in 1933,
they left behind a souvenir by which the Nicaraguan people could remember them:
the National Guard, placed under the direction of one Anastasio Somoza ... Three
years later, Somoza took over the presidency and with the indispensable help of
the National Guard established a family dynasty which would rule over Nicaragua,
much like a private estate, for the next 43 years. While the Guardsmen,
consistently maintained by the United States, passed their time on martial law,
rape, torture, murder of the opposition, and massacres of peasants, as well as
less violent pursuits such as robbery, extortion, contraband, running brothels
and other government functions, the Somoza clan laid claim to the lion's share
of Nicaragua's land and businesses. When Anastasio Somoza II was overthrown by
the Sandinistas in July 1979, he fled into exile leaving behind a country in
which two-thirds of the population earned less than $300 a year. Upon his
arrival in Miami, Somoza admitted to being worth $100 million. A US intelligence
report, however, placed it at $900 million.

It was fortunate for the new Nicaraguan leaders that they came to power while
Jimmy Carter sat in the White House. It gave them a year and a half of relative
breathing space to take the first steps in their planned reconstruction of an
impoverished society before the relentless hostility of the Reagan
administration descended upon them; which is not to say that Carter welcomed the
Sandinista victory.

In 1978, with Somoza nearing collapse, Carter authorized covert CIA support
for the press and labor unions in Nicaragua in an attempt to create a "moderate"
alternative to the Sandinistas. Towards the same end, American diplomats were
conferring with non-leftist Nicaraguan opponents of Somoza. Washington's idea of
"moderate", according to a group of prominent Nicaraguans who walked out on the
discussions, was the inclusion of Somoza's political party in the future
government and "leaving practically intact the corrupt structure of the
somocista apparatus", including the National Guard, albeit in some reorganized
form. Indeed, at this same time, the head of the US Southern Command (Latin
America), Lt. General Dennis McAuliffe, was telling Somoza that, although he had
to abdicate, the United States had "no intention of permitting a settlement
which would lead to the destruction of the National Guard". This was a notion
remarkably insensitive to the deep loathing for the Guard felt by the great
majority of the Nicaraguan people.

*****

After the Sandinistas took power, Carter authorized the CIA to provide
financial and other support to their opponents. At the same time, Washington
pressured the Sandinistas to include certain men in the new government. Although
these tactics failed, the Carter administration did not refuse to give aid to
Nicaragua. Ronald Reagan was later to point to this and ask: "Can anybody doubt
the generosity and good faith of the American people?" What the president failed
to explain was:

a) Almost all of the aid had gone to non-governmental agencies and to the
private sector, including the American Institute for Free Labor Development, the
long-time CIA front.

b) The primary and expressed motivation for the aid was to strengthen the
hands of the so-called moderate opposition and undercut the influence of
socialist countries in Nicaragua .

c) All military aid was withheld despite repeated pleas from the Nicaraguan
government about its need and right to such help-the defeated National Guardsmen
and other Supporters of Somoza had not, after all, disappeared; they had
regrouped as the "contras" and maintained primacy in the leadership of this
force from then on.

In January 1981, Ronald Reagan took office under a Republican platform which
asserted that it "deplores the Marxist Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua". The
president moved quickly to cut off virtually all forms of assistance to the
Sandinistas, the opening salvos of his war against their revolution. The
American whale, yet again, felt threatened by a minnow in the Caribbean.

Among the many measures undertaken: Nicaragua was excluded from US government
programs which promote American investment and trade; sugar imports from
Nicaragua were slashed by 90 percent; and, without excessive subtlety but with
notable success, Washington pressured the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank, and the European Common
Market to withhold loans to Nicaragua. The director of the IDB, Mr. Kevin
O'Sullivan, later revealed that in 1983 the US had opposed a loan to aid
Nicaraguan fishermen on the grounds that the country did not have adequate fuel
for their boats. A week later, O'Sullivan pointed out, "saboteurs blew up a
major Nicaraguan fuel depot in the port of Corinto", an act described by an
American intelligence source as 'totally a CIA operation''.

Washington did, however, offer $5.1 million in aid to private organizations
and to the Roman Catholic Church in Nicaragua. This offer was rejected by the
government because, it said, "United States congressional hearings revealed that
the [aid] agreements have political motivations, designed to promote resistance
and destabilize the Revolutionary Government.'' As Nicaragua had already
arrested members of several of the previous recipient organizations such as the
Moravian Church and the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) for
involvement in armed plots against the government.

The Reagan administration was not deterred. Cardinal Miguel Obando and the
Catholic Church in Nicaragua received hundreds of thousands of dollars in covert
aid, from the CIA until 1985, and then-after official US government aid was
stopped by congressional oversight committees-from Oliver North's off-the-books
operation in the White House basement. One end to which Obando reportedly put
the money was "religious instruction" to "thwart the Marxist-Leninist policies
of the Sandinistas''.

As part of a concerted effort to deprive the Nicaraguan economy of oil,
several attacks on fuel depots were carried out. Contra/CIA operations emanating
in Honduras also blew up oil pipelines, mined the waters of oil-unloading ports,
and threatened to blow up any approaching oil tankers; at least seven foreign
ships were damaged by the mines, including a Soviet tanker with five crewmen
reported to be badly injured. Nicaragua's ports were under siege: mortar
shelling from high-speed motor launches, aerial bombing and rocket and
machine-gun attacks were designed to blockade Nicaragua's exports as well as to
starve the country of imports by frightening away foreign shipping. In October
1983, Esso announced that its tankers would no longer carry crude oil to
Nicaragua from Mexico, the country's leading supplier; at this point Nicaragua
had a 10-day supply of oil.

Agriculture was another prime target. Raids by contras caused extensive
damage to crops and demolished tobacco-drying barns, grain silos, irrigation
projects, farm houses and machinery; roads, bridges and trucks were destroyed to
prevent produce from being moved; numerous state farms and cooperatives were
incapacitated and harvesting was prevented other farms still intact were
abandoned because of the danger.

And in October 1982, the Standard Fruit Company announced that it was
suspending all its banana operations in Nicaragua and the marketing of the fruit
in the United States. The American multinational, after a century of enriching
itself in the country, and in violation of a contract with the government which
extended to 1985, left behind the uncertainty of employment for some 4,000
workers and approximately six million cases of bananas to harvest with neither
transport nor market.'

Nicaragua's fishing industry suffered not only from lack of fuel for its
boats. The fishing fleet was decimated by mines and attacks, its trawlers idled
for want of spare parts due to the US credit blockade. The country lost millions
of dollars from reduced shrimp exports.'

It was an American war against Nicaragua. The contras had their own various
motivations for wanting to topple the Sandinista government. They did not need
to be instigated by the United States. But before the US military arrived in
Honduras in the thousands and set up Fortress America, the contras were engaged
almost exclusively in hit-and-run forays across the border, small-scale raids on
Nicaraguan border patrols and farmers, attacks on patrol boats, and the like;
killing a few people here, burning a building down there,' there was no future
for the contras in a war such as this against a much larger force. Then the
American big guns began to arrive in 1982, along with the air power, the landing
strips, the docks, the radar stations, the communications centers, built under
the cover of repeated joint US-Honduran military exercises, while thousands of
contras were training in Florida and California.

US and "Honduran" reconnaissance planes, usually piloted by Americans, began
regular overflights into Nicaragua to photograph bombing and sabotage targets,
track Sandinista military maneuvers and equipment, spot the planting of mines,
eavesdrop on military communications and map the terrain. Electronic
surveillance ships off the coast of Nicaragua partook in the bugging of a
nation. Said a former CIA analyst: "Our intelligence from Nicaragua is so good
... we can hear the toilets flush in Managua."

Meanwhile, American pilots were flying diverse kinds of combat missions
against Nicaraguan troops and carrying supplies to contras inside Nicaraguan
territory. Several were shot down and killed.' Some flew in civilian clothes,
after having been told that they would be disavowed by the Pentagon if captured.
Some contras told American congressmen that they were ordered to claim
responsibility for a bombing raid organized by the CIA and flown by Agency
mercenaries. Honduran troops as well were trained by the US for bloody
hit-and-run operations into Nicaragua ... and so it went ... as in El Salvador,
the full extent of American involvement in the fighting will never be known.

The contras' brutality earned them a wide notoriety. They regularly destroyed
health centers, schools, agricultural cooperatives, and community centers-symbols
of the Sandinistas' social programs in rural areas. People caught in these
assaults were often tortured and killed in the most gruesome ways. One example,
reported by The Guardian of London, suffices. In the words of a survivor of a
raid in Jinotega province, which borders on Honduras:

"Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her
heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off, and their eyes
poked out They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out
through the slit."

Americas Watch, the human-rights organization, concluded that "the contras
systematically engage in violent abuses ... so prevalent that these may be said
to be their principal means of waging war."

In November 1984, the Nicaraguan government announced that since 1981 the
contras had assassinated 910 state officials and killed 8,000 civilians.

The analogy is inescapable: if Nicaragua had been Israel, and the contras the
PLO, the Sandinistas would have long before made a lightning bombing raid on the
bases in Honduras and wiped them out completely. The United States would have
tacitly approved the action, the Soviet Union would have condemned it but done
nothing, the rest of the world would have raised their eyebrows, and that would
have been the end of it.

After many contra atrocity stories had been reported in the world press, it
was disclosed in October 1984 that the CIA had prepared a manual of instruction
for its clients which, amongst other things, encouraged the use of violence
against civilians. In the wake of the furor in Congress caused by the expose,
the State Department was obliged to publicly condemn the contras' terrorist
activities. Congressional intelligence committees were informed by the CIA, by
present and former contra leaders, and by other witnesses that the contras
indeed "raped, tortured and killed unarmed civilians, including children" and
that "groups of civilians, including women and children, were burned,
dismembered, blinded and beheaded". These were the same rebels whom Ronald
Reagan, with his strange mirror language, called "freedom fighters" and the
"moral equal of our founding fathers". (The rebels in El Salvador, in the
president's studied opinion, were "murderers and terrorists".)

The CIA manual, entitled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, gave
advice on such niceties as political assassination, blackmailing ordinary
citizens, mob violence, kidnapping, and blowing up public buildings. Upon
entering a town, it said, "establish a public tribunal" where the guerrillas can
"shame, ridicule and humiliate" Sandinistas and their sympathizers by "shouting
slogans and jeers". "If ... it should be necessary ... to fire on a citizen who
was trying to leave the town," guerrillas should explain that "he was an enemy
of the people" who would have alerted the Sandinistas who would then "carry out
acts of reprisals such as rapes, pillage, destruction, captures, etc."

****

In January 1983, the so-called Contadora group, composed of Mexico, Panama,
Colombia and Venezuela, began to meet periodically in an attempt to still the
troubled waters of Central America. Rejecting at the outset the idea that the
conflicts of the region could or should be seen as part of an East-West
confrontation, they conferred with all the nations involved, including the
United States. The complex and lengthy discussions eventually gave birth to a
21-point treaty which dealt with the most contentious issues: civil war, foreign
intervention, elections, and human rights.

Then, much to Washington's surprise, on 7 September 1984 Nicaragua announced
its intention to sign the treaty.

*****

The American ambassador to Costa Rica likened Nicaragua under the Sandinistas
to an "infected piece of meat" that attracts "insects." President Reagan called
the country a "totalitarian dungeon", and insisted that the people of Nicaragua
were more oppressed than blacks in South Africa.

Members of the Kissinger Commission on Central America indicated that
Nicaragua under the Sandinistas was as bad or worse than Nicaragua under Somoza.
Henry Kissinger believed it to be as bad as or worse than Nazi Germany. Reagan
was in accord-he compared the plight of the contras to Britain's stand against
Germany in World War II.

"Central America," noted Wayne Smith, former head of the US Interests Section
in Havana, "now exercises the same influence on American foreign policy as the
full moon does on werewolves.

So all-consuming, so unrelenting, was the hatred, that Kissinger demanded
that the American ambassador to Nicaragua be removed simply because he reported
that the Sandinista government was "performing fairly well in such areas as
education". And in the wake of the terrible devastation in Nicaragua wrought by
Hurricane Joan in October 1988, the Reagan administration refused to send any
aid nor to help private American organizations do so.

So eager was the State Department to turn the Sandinistas into international
pariahs, that it told the world, without any evidence, that Nicaragua was
exporting drugs, that it was anti Semitic, that it was training Brazilian
guerrillas. When the CIA was pressed about the alleged Sandinista drug
connection, it backed down from the administration's claim.
Secretary of State Alexander Haig referred to a photograph of blazing corpses
and declared it an example of the "atrocious genocidal actions that are being
taken by the Nicaraguan Government" against the Miskito Indians. We then learned
that the photo was from 1978, Somoza's time.

*****

By the time the war in Nicaragua began to slowly atrophy to a tentative
conclusion during 1988-89, the Reagan administration's obsession with the
Sandinistas had inspired both the official and unofficial squads to embrace
tactics such as the following in order to maintain a steady flow of financing,
weaponry and other aid to the contras: dealings with other middle-eastern and
Latin American terrorists, frequent drug smuggling in a variety of imaginative
ways, money laundering, embezzlement of US government funds, perjury,
obstruction of justice, burglary of the offices of American dissidents, covert
propaganda to defeat domestic political foes, violation of the neutrality act,
illegal shredding of government documents, plans to suspend the Constitution in
the event of widespread internal dissent against government policy ... and much
more, as revealed in the phenomenon known as Iran/Contra ... all of it to
support the band of rapists, torturers and killers known as the Contras

This then, was the level of charm reached by anti-communism after 70 years of
refinement. The imperial sensibility of America's leaders could be compared
favorably with that of Britain circa 1925.

But it worked.

On 25 February 1990, the Sandinistas were defeated in national elections by a
coalition of political parties running under the name National Opposition Union
(UNO). President George Bush called it "a victory for democracy"... Senator
Robert Dole declared that "The final outcome is a vindication of the Reagan
policies."... Elliott Abrams, former State Department official and Iran/Contra
leading light, said "When history is written the contras will be folk heroes.''

The opposing analysis of the election was that ten years of all-encompassing
war had worn the Nicaraguan people down. They were afraid that as long as the
Sandinistas remained in power, the contras and the United States would never
relent in their campaign to overthrow them. The people voted for peace. (As the
people of the Dominican Republic had voted in 1966 for the US-supported
candidate to forestall further American military intervention.)

"We can't take any more war. All we have had is war, war, war, war," said
Samuel Reina, a driver for Jimmy Carter's election monitoring team in Juigalpa.
In some families "one son has been drafted by the Sandinistas and another has
joined the contras. The war has torn families apart.''

The US invasion and bombing of Panama just two months earlier, with all its
death and destruction, could only have intensified the commitment of hardcore
Sandinistas to resist yanqui imperialismo, but it could not have failed to serve
as a caution to the large bloc of undecided voters.

The Nicaraguans were also voting, they hoped, for some relief from the
grinding poverty that five years of a full American economic embargo, as well as
the war, had heaped upon their heads. Commented Paul Reichler, a US lawyer who
represented the Nicaraguan government in Washington at the time: "Whatever
revolutionary fervor the people once might have had was beaten out of them by
the war and the impossibility of putting food in their children's stomachs.''

... For ten years the people of Nicaragua had shouted [the] slogan-"Here, no
one gives up." But in February 1990, they did exactly that. (Just as the people
of Chile had chanted "The people united will never be defeated", before
succumbing to American power.)

The United States had more than war and embargo at its disposal to determine
the winner of the election. The National Endowment for Democracy spent more than
$11 million dollars, directly and indirectly, on the election campaign in
Nicaragua. This is comparable to a foreign government pouring more than $700
million dollars into an American election, and is in addition to several million
dollars more allocated by Congress to "supporting the electoral infrastructure,
and the unknown number of millions the CIA passed around covertly.

As a result of a controversy in 1984-when NED funds were used to aid a
Panamanian presidential candidate backed by Noriega and the CIA-Congress enacted
a law prohibiting the use of NED funds "to finance the campaigns of candidates
for public office." The ways to circumvent the letter and/or spirit of such a
prohibition were not difficult to conceive. NED first allocated millions to help
organize UNO, building up the parties and organizations that formed and
supported the coalition. Then a variety of other organizations-civic, labor,
media, women's, etc.-run by UNO activists received grants for all kinds of "non
partisan" and "pro-democracy" programs, for voter education, voter registration,
job skills, and so on. Large grants made to UNO itself were specified for items
such as office equipment and vehicles. (Rep. Silvio Conte of Massachusetts
pointed out that the $1.3 million requested for vehicles would pay for renting
2,241 cars for a month at $20 per day.) UNO was the only political party to
receive US aid, even though eight other opposition parties fielded candidates.
Money received by UNO for any purpose of course freed up their own money for use
in the campaign and helped all of their candidates. Moreover, the US continued
to fund the contras, some of whom campaigned for UNO in rural areas.

Afterwards, critics of the American policy in Nicaragua called it "a
blueprint" for successful US intervention in the Third World. A Pentagon analyst
agreed: "It's going right into the textbooks.